The challenge of our time is to find a journey worthy of your heart and soul.

“Art isn’t a result; it’s a journey.” Powerful. I’m on the journey. Not only as a writer, but as a person constantly seeking the art and beauty in life. And I think Seth is right, the journey isn’t always pretty or comfortable and sometimes it’s even terrifying. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s the only way to go. Let me know what you think of this post. Have you found a journey “worthy of your heart and soul”? Let do this journey together!

One of the things that makes me cringe is when people equate art with beauty. “Oh, Mozart is soooooo booooootiful,” they say.

Cezanne, Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, they were all not beautiful at one time. Van Gogh sold one painting in his lifetime. His contemporaries sold dozens of picture of pretty flowers in pretty vases.

There is beauty in art, but it’s not just purdy thangs. There’s beauty in the tangled mess of a Jackson Pollock. There’s beauty in the anguish of Mahler and the sometimes unlikeable, often uncheery characters of a Deborah Eisenberg story.

There’s beauty in cutting through all the kitsch and window-dressing that is so much of life and finding the truth in the center. That is beauty. The Greeks knew this four thousand years ago. They told us, if only we were smart enough not to forget it regularly.

Or, a quotation the late, great Steve Jobs liked to bring up in relation to what’s art and what’s “beautiful”: “Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.”

I can conjure up the glue and paste smells too. I remember when you got a slab of glue on a piece of paper. Those were the days! I still remember the smell of the thick poster paint in the easel stand, too.

Thanks, John. I agree wholeheartedly. And to Barbara, thanks for the memories of paper mache and poster paint–some of the favorite smells of my childhood–and let’s not forget the smell of a box of new crayolas at the beginning of every school year!